


stay (inside my mother) never to come out

by okayantigone



Category: Hunter X Hunter
Genre: Angst, Child Abuse, Family Dynamics, Gen, Introspection, M/M, Past Child Abuse, Zoldyck Family - Freeform
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-08-13
Updated: 2019-08-13
Packaged: 2020-08-20 22:02:18
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,085
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20235076
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/okayantigone/pseuds/okayantigone
Summary: "oh, illu," kikyou clung to him tighter, and cried harder, "you’re just impossible to love."he’d decided he didn’t want to know this. he’d decided he didn’t want to hear it. he’d blinked stupidly at her, and chosen to filter the words out, and not understand them."if i hear this," he thought, "and i understand it, and i understand that she means it… i won’t survive it."illumi is the stupidest zoldyck ever born, his head is full of rocks. he is so annoying his parents can barely stand the thought of him. he knows this.





	stay (inside my mother) never to come out

**Author's Note:**

> big sad about illumi times lmao   
nen_user on twitter talked about how unloveable illumi is and it ouched me deeply.

hisoka lets himself into his heaven’s arena apartment through the window of the spacious terrace, because sometimes, he likes to use bungee gum and climb the side of the building, camouflaging himself with texture surprise, and managing this way to avoid his many devoted loving fans who tend to hound him at the entrance.

he lets himself in, and the apartment is dark, and smells vaguely like sea salt, which is concerning, on account of heaven’s arena being nowhere near a sea. not for the first time, hisoka wonders if maybe he is having a stroke. it’s a frequent concern with him. he does not know what his mother died of. he can never be sure, if it will be genetics that take him, or his own violent lifestyle, and he much prefers to be prepared for this sort of thing.

he will die before he succumbs to some fascinatingly common thing like tuberculosis. he’s got all his shots, like a dog.

he smells sea salt, when he steps into his living room.

illumi is laying on the floor, perfectly prone, flat on his back, staring up at the ceiling. it’s impossible to tell ho wlong he’s been laying there, except the room smells like sea salt, and illumi is perfectly dry, which must mean – a while.

illumi blinks rarely. his lashes are ipossibly long. at seventeen, he had been a delicate, fragile thing, with bird-like bones, hollow and light. his wrists had shattered deliciously in hisoka’s grip, and illumi hadn’t even flinched, merely looked up at him with those wide empty eyes and blinked.

now he is on the floor, looking at the ceiling, quiet. processing. that’s what hisoka thinks of it as. when he comes home, illumi is quiet, shadow-like. he wants silences. he wants to be left alone. thinking for him is hard, arduous, he wants the time to put everything in his empty little head in order. hisoka lets him.

he walks around his beloved’s prone body, and into the kitchen. he has eggs, and ham and a carrot at the back of his vegetable drawer that’s a breath away from disintegrating. he will have to order groceries soon. he does not particularly care for vegetables, but they are a luxury that is now a commodity. being able to eat a vegetable in and of itself is more important than his subjective opinion of them.

he chops an onion, and a clove of garlic. illumi is doing his thinking, silent and inobtrusive. hisoka can easily forget his beloved is there. he makes an effort not to.

the omelette sizzles in the pan. he picks up the sad remnants of the cheese and adds it in, for that melty creamy texture illu is ever so fond of. if he could, he would eat only soft, creamy things. yogurts, and puddings and jellies, applesauce, and fruit purees, bread dipped in honeyed milk. rather like an infant, in that regard – in many regards, really.

for hisoka, the lines between being illumi’s parent and lover are blurred, because for illumi the lines between being a child and a lover are blurred. he does not know what to do with affection. he does not know what to do with anything, this empty, frequently confused doll of his.

finally, illumi stands up from the floor.

hisoka turns the stove off, and transfers the eggs into a plate, while illumi meanders gracefully into the bathroom, to wash the seasalt away. his showers are short and efficient, he does not, like hisoka, enjoy luxuriating.

he comes back with his dripping wet hair tied into a messy bun, wearing one of hisoka’s threadbare shirts, and shorts that were – probably at some point – proper trousers. he looks lovely and wonderful. his pale arms are covered in bruises, as are his delicate ankles. hisoka wants to kiss them and bandage them.

he piles food in illumi’s plate, and pours syrup into their cups, distilling it with water – sparkling for himself, still for illu.

they eat in perfect silence. illumi might still be processing. hisoka does not want to distract him. illumi does not like to be distracted. it confuses him, and he hates being confused.

_zano calls me the stupidest zoldyck alive. _

“i think killua hurt my feelings today,” illumi says finally. he dabs his pretty mouth with the napkin, and puts his knife and fork to the side of his empty plate.

hisoka distills his syrup with moonshine one of his fans gifted him, and arches an eyebrow. “oh?”

illumi gets confused by feelings, the same way hisoka used to get confused at the rich colorful markets in the big cities. they have both been starved in different ways.

illumi looks at emotions the way hisoka looks at broccoli – with thinly veiled mistrust, and a deep-sated lack of understanding as to why they are necessary for his wellbeing.

that being said, hisoka is going to wring killua’s skinny little neck with his bare hands. if illumi – who is constantly being eluded by the understanding of feeling and emotion that seems to bind the rest of humanity together – is considering the foreign idea that killua might have in fact – through words or action – sought to injure that most sacred, worn down part of his little bruised heart – feelings that had ben savagely beaten out of illumi before he was even taught the words to process them – then he must have truly done something heinous. and hisoka wants him dead for it, in the same quiet way that he wants all the zoldyck family dead for the way in which illumi spends hours laying on the floor, staring at the feelings, and arranging and rearranging the mothballs in his skull that are the remnants of his ability for independent thought.

“yes,” illumi says. he is not looking at hisoka. he rarely ever does. looking at people confuses him too. he can’t read them as easily as his more talented siblings. he lacks the mechanisms of understanding the way facial expressions function. he spent so long trying to learn. he hates to see himself fail. “he was… well. i think he was cruel to me.” illumi shrugs his lovely round shoulders.

_he’s always cruel to you_, hisoka thinks. _ungrateful brat. _

he has long ago given up on trying to work through the layers of denial illumi has wrapped around the cruelty of his household in order to survive it.

illumi had convinced himself there was no cruelty. he lived in his mind, in a perfect world, where things were just as they should be, and if they weren’t, then it was surely his fault. it’s how he’d learned to survive in that poison-soaked air, but by the time he’d finally crawled out – already a man – he was just a desperate half creature, his lungs full of pollution, the clean oxygen around him painful and dizzying.

illumi doesn’t bring it up again. instead, he tells hisoka about the job he and killua were on, in some little fishing village. he describes it in painstaking detail, because he is observant, because every little thing makes an impression on him. he tells hisoka about the fishermen’s nets, and the old grizzled men who drank moonshine, and ate little salted fishes in the tavern, which illumi had also tried and enjoyed. little salted fish on buttered brown bread. hisoka knows all about fishermen nets – after the circus, he’d hunkered down in a village of the coast of glam gas for a few months, and he’d had no choice but to learn. he lets illumi tell him anyway. he lets illumi talk, because he cares about what illumi has to say. even if it’s silly, even if it’s just inane observations. his sweetheart has spend hours, laying on the floor, and putting his little story in order to tell to hisoka. to participate in the conversation like an equal. illumi is incapable of nuance. he cannot make jokes, and he struggles to understand them. his favorite form of narrative are boring biographies, with many dates and facts, and historical texts with long-winded words. but hisoka listens to illumi’s story, because to not listen to it would be the kind of violence he is incapable of inflicting on his beloved.

“that sounds lovely, sweetheart,” he tells, when illumi tells him he liked wading into the sea, just up to his knees, and feeling the sand under his bare feet. he’d just watched killua put the body into the water, to make sure it was done right, and he’d enjoyed the breeze.

“did you get seashells?” hisoka asks absent-mindedly as he cleans the dishes.

illumi goes suspiciously still behind him.   
“should i have?”

he sounds almost afraid. in his mind, hisoka’s question is a reprimand, is a scolding. _you didn’t do this thing, that you should have done and now i am angry. _

hisoka shakes his head, and turns around, carefully keeping his face and tone neutral.   
“some people do,” he says lightly, “when they go to the sea, they get seashells, because they think seashells are pretty and want to keep a little memory of the trip.”

“oh,” illumi says, and shakes his head, his beautiful hair coming out in thick wet strands from his bun. “i didn’t… but i do think they’re pretty…” he trails off, confused, perhaps, by the fact that he could have done something that others do – that it would have been normal, if he’d done it.

“maybe next time you go to the sea?” hisoka suggests gently, and cups his face in his hand, still wet and covered in peach-scented dish soap.

“that will be… nice?” illumi makes it a question.   
he looks like a drowned mermaid, with his big sad eyes, and wet messy hair.

“yes, my love,” hisoka says patiently and kisses his forehead. “you can keep them here. we can arrange them together, in a little basket, like they sell in the markets.”

illmi delights in that. he doesn’t smile, but his eyes, briefly, fill with light. the idea that hisoka wants to _do _something with him – together, to have a memory of the time they spend … hisoka kisses his forehead again, and finishes doing the dishes.

illumi lays in hisoka’s big double bed in his heaven’s arena apartment. he is using hisoka’s full true to size pariston hill body pillow to prop his neck up, and he feels quietly warm and content under the blankets. beside him, hisoka is curled up, his back towards illumi, and burrowed under the thick duvet. after dinner, they had kissed so much, illumi thought it was impossible that anyone ever had been as well-kissed as him. then hisoka hasd gently dabbed his herbal pomades on his bruises, and bound his sprained uncle and kissed over the arches of his feet. he’d brushed delicious smelling oil into illumi’s hair, and braided it tightly for him, so it wouldn’t be in the way, and they’d laid in bed next to each other. illumi was doing needlepoint – it helped his focus with his needles, and he always felt a quiet sense of accomplishment. currently, he was working on a pattern of yorbian poppies. beside him, hisoka was reading, and sometimes, when a joke made him laugh out loud, he read it to illumi, and explained it patiently. illumi always found the jokes funny. he liked jokes. he liked to smile and laugh. except, jokes confused him, and no one ever cared to explain them to him. but hisoka did. hisoka knew what illumi would think is funny, and he made sure to tell them funny stories to him, and if he was still confused, hisoka would explain why the joke was funny. and then illumi could get it, and laugh too. illumi liked to be in on the joke. he liked to understand things.

he knew he was stupid. it would be impossible for him to have gone through life so long, and not realize that fundamentally, he was just a stupid child. he got confused easily. he didn’t know things. zeno called him the stupidest zoldyck to have ever been born, and made jokes -_it’s a joke, you oblivious little idiot, an old man can’t even have a little fun in this house anymore, with that thing around- _about what mother must have been eating in meteor city, to give birth to such a stupid child. but then milluki was born, and he wasn’t stupid, so probably, it was just him.

hisoka had finished his book chapter, closed his book and put it to the side, and then he asked illumi if he would like to keep the light on to continue his design.

illumi knew with hisoka, there were no trick questions. hisoka put his questions as simple as possible. there were no traps. there were no slaps that came if he answered wrong.

“it’s okay,” illumi says, and put his needlework in his bedside drawer. he picked up a stuffed dragon that was part of hisoka’s delightful collection of soft toys, and laid it over his chest, feeling its calming weight.   
“okay, my love.” hisoka sayd simply. he pulled a large fluffy dog into his arms, from the pile of toys haphazardly arranged on the floor, and turned out the light. “goodnight, illu.”   
“goodnight, hisoka,” illumi said. hisoka’s breathing had evened out quickly, while illumi was still awake. like everything else he was slow with, he was slow to fall asleep.

“you are very difficult to love,” mother had said once.

hisoka didn’t seem to struggle with it at all, not even a little bit. maybe he was better at loving than mother.

after their job, killua had sulked, which was not entirely unusual for him, but it was impossible for illumi to tell what he had done to encroach on his brother’d delicate, prepubescent emotional balance this time.

“killua’s just a jerk,” milluki had said sagely. he rarely begrudged illumi his confusion. while not as stupid as him – not by a long shot – illumi always thought his younger brother was quite perceptive and intelligent, with a quick intuitiveness that illumi simply lacked- milluki too, was perplexed by some things. however, he understood people and feelings. he watched shows, illumi knew, where people displayed emotion, and said things, and showed their thoughts with their faces. if bribed correctly, with food, and exotic figurines of little imaginary women, and posters of obscure series long-ago discontinuted, he was happy to shed light on illumi’s confusions for him.

“god, you’re so dumb, aniki,” he’d say, voice laced with exasperation, and munch on strawberry mochi. but he’d explain to illumi anyway.

the explanation for killua’s behavior, had been shockingly succinct. “he’s just a jerk.” well. illumi could, he supposed, understand that, inasmuch as it required very little understanding on his part.

if killus was “just” a jerk, then there was nothing to be done about it, as it was merely a fact of his existence. killua is just more talented than illumi. he is just going to be the heir to the family. he is just a jerk. illumi takes infinite comfort in facts, which he cannot change, and which exist without having to be understood or explained.

killua had displayed his jerk-like behavior on their way back, when simply sulking hadn’t been enough.

illumi relied on the fact that he was stupid. since it was a fact, he could not change it, he merely had to work around it. and since everyone knew that he was stupid, they tempered their expectations of his ability to perceive and understand things, and he always made sure to fall exactly within the line of those expectations. he had been an overachiever, once. but killua was heir, and illumi no longer had anything to prove. he was stupid, and oblivious, and he felt no need to change the facts, because the fact was also – he would never be as talented as killua. hard work can’t beat talent, after all, and illumi had endured a lot of beating in his life.

so, because killua knew that illumi was stupid and oblivious, and because illumi pretended not to notice his sulking – so as not to encourage it, and also, so as not to have to punish the blatant and unacceptable display of emotions, killua did, eventually, blow up.

“god,” he said.   
“don’t blaspheme,” illumi interjected quickly, as though mother could hear from so far away.   
“you’re so fucking annoying,” killua spoke over him, with an exaggerated roll of his big blue eyes.   
“don’t cuss,” illumi said mildly.

“god,” killua snarled furiously, “i can’t fucking stand you!” he thew his little hands in the air in perfect affectation of mother’s hysteric fits. “you just… hover all the time, always looking, like… what? i’ve been doing this crap since i was five, you think i’m gonna mess something up _now? _and do you _ever _stop talking? no _wonder _no one can stand you. well, except alluka, but it’s not like she has much choice, since she physically can’t run away from your _constant nonsense.” _

illumi blinked slowly, heard every word and put it away for processing.

“you’re impossible,” snapped killua. there was so much naked hatred in his eyes. illumi did not flinch.

“why are you so angry at me?” he asked quietly. different person, but the same refrain. he’d been going around, asking since he was old enough to speak. _why are you so angry? why are you hitting me? why don’t you want me here? _

he was stupid, annoying, ugly and weird, and those were just facts of his life, that he could not change.

_my dear boy, _mother had cried, holding him to her chest. _no one is ever going to love you. _

“you’re my mother,” he’d said. he must have been very young. “don’t you love me.”

_oh, illu, _she’d clung to him tighter, and cried harder, _you’re just impossible to love. _

he’d decided he didn’t want to know this. he’d decided he didn’t want to hear it. he’d blinked stupidly at her, and chosen to filter the words out, and not understand them.

_if i hear this, _he thought, _and i understand it, and i understand that she means it… i won’t survive it. _

“i’m angry because i can’t stand you, and i wish you’d just up and _fucking _disappear,” killua practically screamed.

zeno had recently taught him to curse, and at eleven-and-a-half years old, killua simply delighted in vulgarity. it brought mother to apoplectic hysterics, which was, doubtlessly,, grandfather’s underlying motive.

“well,” said illumi.

“i didn’t want you around yesterday!” killua shouted, which finally brought illumi to understand what this was all about. he chose not to betray his understanding, and blinked slowly instead. darkness flashed in front of his eyes momentarily. “me and grandpa and dad were having a _nice _conversation, and you were just being _annoying! _none of us wanted you there, while we were trying to talk like normal people.”

killua had been getting his electricity tolerance upped with a cattle prod, and illumi had come in to talk to father about a job in swardani. pariston hill was a regular. mother had taken it. there had been a double booking for the same victim and illu had taken him out. mother was furious with him. hill was threatening to go to the competition. the zoldyck family had no competition. with his face scratched ot bloody ribbons, illumi had gone into the training wing to ask father to intervene on his behalf.

they had all been laughing about something. zeno was telling one of his confusing, long-winded stories about the trouble he’d used to get into with the hunter association chariman netero, and poking killua in the ribs with the cattle prod every second sentence. silva had taken over with a story from a job in meteor city around the time he’d met mother. he was cracking wallnuts from the garden open and piling them in a bowl for killua to snack on later.

illumi had a similar story – he’d recently ran into chrollo. he thought it would be relevant. he thought that was how conversations worked- he’d overseved and listened carefully at the dinner table. zeno would say something. then silva would pick up with something related to what zeno said. sometimes, mother would respond to it. if you had a story that was related to a story someone else said, you would contribute to the conversation, by telling it. then, you would leave some open space, so people could ask a question, or respond with their own story. he thought he had a pretty good grasp on conversation. he’d worked so hard to learn. he’d thought it was a good time to experiment.

“we just couldn’t wait for you to stop talking and _leave.” _killua said mercilessly. “listening to you prattle on was _worse _than the cattle prod.”

illumi blinks, owlish, stupid. he decides this is another thing he does not want to know. he’d tried to hard. he liked to talk with hisoka. hisoka always listened to his stories. for a moment, the idea that maybe, hisoka too, like killua, and zeno and father, couldn’t wait for illumi to stop talking and go away, came up in his chest, big and impossible to ignore. he desperately wanted to put some sand from the beach in his mouth, and chew on it until his jaw hurt, and taste the salt of it.

the thought that all his hard work had been for nothing… he’d watched milluki’s shows, and read mother’s books, which he didn’t like, because they were confusing – full of so many people who said one thing, and meant another, and used words that didn’t mean the things they were supposed to – and the way he’d catalogued, in his head, his important memories, like filed mission reports, so they could come up useful in a conversation –

he felt something big and painful raise up in the back of his head. for a moment, he wondered if he was going to have one of his pain flares in his head. then he realized it was different. it was the exact same painful feeling he’d had that day, when he told him he wasn’t going to be the heir anymore. the understanding that all of this work had been useless, that he was too stupid, and untalented and damaged, that even working this hard couldn’t make up for it brought the painful feeling.

he hadn’t said anything that day. he never said anything at all.

in the old days of the kakin empire, when there were many children born to the emperor, they were tasked with a lengthy contest, where they hunted and killed each other until only one winner remained. maybe, illumi thought dully, it would have been better if they had just drowned him in the well, when they decided to make killua heir.

“well,” he repeated quietly. “if you want me gone so bad, keep your head down in training, and maybe in twenty years, you’ll get good enough to kill me your own _fucking _self.”

he never cussed, but the word felt good in his mouth, like a handful of sand.

for a moment, killua stared at him. his eyes went big, the way they did when the force of illumi’s attacks surprised him. the way they did when he dared to cuss at mother, and illumi, without even turned him around, backhanded him hard enough to send him into the wall, for daring to upset her.

illumi blinked again, slowly. he decided to unhear what killua had said. he decided to forget he knew how to understand it. they walked home.

“i think killua is old enough to do these things on his own now,” illumi said in their father’s desk. “i don’t think he needs me anymore.”

“you don’t think at all,” zeno chuckled. he was sitting in the corner in father’s study, smoking his pipe with delicious smelling herbs and reading the evening paper. illumi blinked owlishly at him and pretended not to understand.

he walked out.

“will you be staying for dinner?” tsubone asked in a voice that suggested she would personally feed him rat poison and then hold his throat closed, if he said yes.   
he shook his head. he didn’t need the staff to be nice to him, or even respectful. their barely-contained distaste for him – which was one of the things he understood to be a fact, much like his own stupidity, that he could not change – had permeated his every day in the house. maybe it was because he was ugly, and odd-looking, and they could not stand to look at his foreign face.

he’d read in books about people who could not stand the look of foreigners. they were bad people, his books said, which illumi thought made sense. but he had never been in any place to put value judgments on the people of the zoldyck household. instead of trying to comprehend tsubone’s resentment, he merely avoided the staff as much as he was able, by cleaning his own living space, cooking his own food, and doing his own laundry.

“no,” he said flatly.

if anyone else- like mother – had asked, he would have elaborated. he would have said “i will have dinner with an associate.”

he had practiced the phrasing. it would be the least likely to get him punished.

as it was just one of the butlers, there was no need to elaborate.

he passed by the living room, where mother was sat in her favorite chair, listening to music with her eyes closed. she did not call out to him, so he felt no compulsion to go to her. mother had never called out to him. slowly, like everything else he did not need, he’d culled his need for her.

he had kneeled in the study, his forehead pressed into the thick carpet, and listened to father say he was no longer heir. he had no choice. he had to hear, and understand this. he couldn’t choose not to.

_i wonder, _he’d thought then, _if hearing this will break me. _

he’d been surprised to discover that it hadn’t. _and if i can survive this, _he thought to himself, looking through his lashes at the feet of the adults, where his child self was dying, so he could be reborn as an adult, _i wonder what else i can survive. _

in that moment, being told that he was not good for much anymore, he wondered if he was stronger than his father. his father had never lived through this, and he never would. the thought was a cruel secret he locked away in his heart, because to imagine himself stronger than silva was sacrilege. the only one who would ever be stronger than silva now was killua.

but now illumi had tested the final limits of the resilience father had trained into him. now he knew what he could live through.

_i have survived, _he would think to himself sometimes, _more than killua ever has. and that must mean i am stronger than he is. _

he was stupid, because being stupid had been easy. deep down, in the same place in his heart, where he knew he had survived more than killua- and was therefore stronger than him – he also knew that “survive” was the wrong word to use. he had not survived. somewhere along the way, he had forgotten to choose to unhear something. and so he had broken. the zoldyck family had no need for a damaged heir. but since that day on the study floor, he also knew – there was nothing he could hear ever, that would break him. he had survived the worst moment of his life. he had come out on the other side, unchanged. the same unloveable, weird, ugly child, now a man.

he must have simply been stupid. he’d looked up at his mother, as he straightened from the bow, but as usual, he could not understand what her face was approximating.

he’d gone to hisoka’s apartment, and laid down on the floor, where he was the most comfortable, to think. thinking was hard, because it required him to activate his abiity to comprehend others, and that was arduous. he prepared the story of his mission for hisoka. he wondered if hisoka wanted to listen to him, or if killua was right, and hisoka too, was clawing out of his skin with desperation for illumi to stop speaking.

but hisoka was quiet while illumi spoke. hisoka called him “my love” and kissed his forehead. he fed illumi tasty eggs with cheese, the way illumi liked him, and have him sweet juice with cherry syrup. he brushed and untangled illumi’s hair without making it hurt even a little bit.

at the end of the evening, hisoka still wanted illumi, still didn’t punish him, and so now illumi would lay in bed beside him, and think himself to sleep.

the screen of his phone flashed with a message. he picked it off the bedside cabinet.   
milluki’s name illuminated his screen. his screensaver was a picture of a cat. it was a black cat with big yellow eyes. illumi had found it in the garden, and quietly let it go outside the tall stone walls. he had liked that the cat’s eyes were as big and stupid as his own, as it had wandered into his family’s home expecting to find anything other than death. kikyou would have had kalluto drown it in the tub, the way she’d had illumi break the canary’s neck.

but illumi liked how stupid the cat looked, with its silky black hair, and big idiotic eyes, and so he had spirited it away.

he’d snapped the picture almost as an afterthought. the cat lived in the village now. he saw it sometimes. a woman from the convenience store fed it expired chicken sausage. illumi wondered if anyone would ever have treated him the same way. picked him up, and taken him to a safe place, where someone would be kind enough to feed him cheap chicken sausage, for no reason than because they had the power to do so.

milluki’s message read _kill’s being an asshole. he said you two had a fight or something [confused emoji that is scratching its head – that means that milluki doesn’t really understand why illumi and killua would have a fight. illumi, as a rule, never fought with his siblings, unless they were sparring]. he’s too chicken [that means scared] to ask you, but are you mad at him?_

illumi swiped the message open.

_i’m not angry at killua. _he typed. he closed his eyes briefly. the ache flared again. he was tired. _tell him that i don’t really care. _

he sent the message. illumi reached to the back of his neck. the needle lodged there kept the scratches in his face nice and closed. he’d have to change it in the morning for a fresh one.

he had given killua about as many concessions as he could. he had slowly but surely erased himself from the family, so killua, who was, after all, a growing boy, could have all the space he needed to become the heir illumi clearly couldn’t be. he’d ran himself into the ground for killua’s betterment. he shut his mouth at dinner, and bore the brunt of silva’s displeasure and mother’s hysterics, and zeno’s mean-spirited jokes, and smoothed all the rough edges between him and milluki, who easily took offense, and him and kalluto, who was, by nature a sweet and sensitive boy, who couldn’t really handle killua “just being a jerk”. illumi walked through that house like a ghost, and forced his limited understanding to overwork, so he could always anticipate the next demand, the next slap, the next words.

if killua wanted him gone so bad, then he _would _be gone. chrollo had tapped him in for a job. nearly five months deep infilitration in the glam gas islands to clean out some people, so the troupe could clean out the estate sales. hisoka had mentioned it.   
“i can show you where i grew up,” he’d said, smiling gently. “you’ll see my people.”

_no one from your family is alive, _illumi had said dumbly. hisoka had kissed his forehead.

“i am a traveler, sweetheart,” hisoka had said. “i have thousands of brothers and sisters all over the world. you will meet them, and you will see. we will sing you songs, and dance for you, and the women will tell you your fortune, and put flowers in your hair.” he’d tucked a strand behind illumi’s ear. “and we’ll get to kill some people, of course,” he’d added, delighted.

illumi opened his father’s contact.

_glam gas deep infiltration, approx.. 5 months, working w/ qw & [spider emoji], report when returning, do not attempt contact until return. _

he didn’t really need to enforce a no contact rule. he simply felt like it. maybe he hadn’t been giving killua as much precious space as he thought, and having him gone would help. after all, he couldn’t always be around to cover for killua’s childish mistakes.

he opened milluki’s contact again. milluki had read his message, and responded with a thumbs up emoji. that meant he had seen, understood, and things were okay.

things had never been okay for illumi. no matter how much he tried, he couldn’t undo the understanding of that. he couldn’t force his stupidity to work to protect him from knowing that he had paid for the luxury of killua’s emotional outbursts with his own constant confusion. playing stupid had not been enough to protect him. he knew what the name of that ugly ache was. it was anger.

it was the anger he’d felt at his father’s feet, and the anger at killua’s cruelty.

killua lived in that house too. killua had seen what they did to him. and like illumi, he had chosen to play stupid, and not understand it. illumi had always thought he could forgive killua for anything.

it was not killua’s fault that he was born talented, or possible to love. it was not his fault that he was born at all. illumi had been born out of _obligation. _he hadn’t been a choice. he knew that. he had been a duty, fulfilled. every single one of the siblings born after him was a choice. they were, each of them, impossibly wanted. illumi had wanted them too, because he’d been stupid. now he knew not to want anything else. he was simply too idiotic to understand the consequences of his desires.

alluka had been the most practical example in understanding that if you asked for something, you had to pay the price. illumi asked for nothing. he took what he was given, and he was grateful, and maybe killua should have learned that lesson too.

he opened killua’s contact.

_if you can say what you said to my face with your whole chest, why don’t you say it to alluka then, and see where it gets you. i’m sure she’ll be happy to grant you a wish. _

he deleted the message. it was cruel. he would never say it to killua’s face. he felt rotten just for thinking it. he locked his phone and put back where it had been.

he had survived things killua would never have to live through. every next time, when he thought he would break, he didn’t. he had forgotten his own strength. he was not sure that killua could survive hearing the same things illumi had.

he wanted to ask his father if he couldn’t stand the sound of his voice. _if i hear it, _he thought, _i will probably survive it. _

_you did this to me, and i survived, _he’d argued once, while working on killua’s training plan with silva.

“just because you can survive it, doesn’t mean you should do it,” silva had snapped.

illumi had open his mouth to fight him on it. _why _would killua get a concession?

he was special. more talented than illumi, he needed a less harsh training regimen.

silva had smacked him, open palm, into the floor. illumi had spat out baby teeth.

he pulled the dragon into his arms, and squeezed its squishy body.

beside him, hisoka was breathing calmly, deeply asleep. illumi closed his eyes, at last. he started imagining the needlepoint patterns for his poppy fields, and counted the threads in his mind until he fell asleep.


End file.
